17 Things From 17 Years: Post 5

#5: Respect is the most important language a wife can learn.

I've written before how eye opening and life changing the book Love And Respect by Emerson Eggerichs has been for me. It's hard to corral all my thoughts on this subject into a concise, little blog post.

Respect is not a woman's mother tongue; it will not just come naturally. For a long time I struggled with the respect thing because I didn't know how. I couldn't even recognize when I did things that were disrespectful, so how could I learn to speak the language? I remember praying, "God, would you please show me? Please teach me?"

I am still learning.

One of the things that has probably helped me the most is learning to believe that if my husband says something felt disrespectful, than it was. It's easy to just argue "I didn't mean it that way!" I probably didn't. But that doesn't change the fact that it felt that way to him. If I don't acknowledge and believe how it felt to him, how am I ever going to learn his language?

Treating my husband with respect means learning what makes him feel respected, not doing what I think is respectful.

Around the time that I begged God to teach me how to respect, I kept a 'respect journal' for awhile. Every day I would write down anytime I was reminded to act respectfully and did it or anytime I did not act respectfully and realized it later. I think that exercise helped me a lot in gaining awareness of what respect really looks like to my husband.

These days respect is still not my mother tongue. But it's a much more familiar second language! I still don't always speak it fluently or eloquently but I am much more quick to realize my mistakes and try to correct them. That's how you learn.